Centralized logging is much more primordial. If you're dealing with HTTP services, centralized logging will show you the status code, path, response time, etc..

Centralized logging is much more primordial. If you're dealing with HTTP services, centralized logging will show you the status code, path, response time, etc.. for every request. With ample support for aggregations. Teaching developers to effectively use Kibana/Splunk/Graylog would provide much more benefits than investigating distributed tracing solutions. If you're dealing with non HTTP services and want to investigate performance. What you're needing is most likely a profiler. Java has a fantastic one out-of-the-box (jvisualvm) that can even work remotely to live production process, C and C++ have some CPU profilers but expensive (the one in visual studio pro/ultimate), python has some tools but don't recall which one was good. Of course none of these tools are trivial to understand for the non initiate. Show a developer stack traces and timing information and they have no idea what they mean, let alone how they are supposed to improve performance from that. What could improve adoption greatly is to give training and record a handful of video tutorials.